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Editorial: Getting to Know Us – A Single Project, the Reason We Write, and a Source of Inspiration
In Brief: In this editorial, In the Library with the Lead Pipe Editorial Board members individually answer three questions: If you had to work on only one project for the next year, what would it be? Are you writing/researching for the love or for the tenure? (Submitted via Twitter by Lead Pipe reader Kenley Neufeld.) And, what was the most inspiring idea you encountered this year?
By Editorial Board, Ellie Collier, Brett Bonfield, and Erin Dorney
If you had to work on only one project for the next year, what would it be?
I pick weeding. This is very much a community college perspective, but I LOVE weeding. I love pulling the circulation reports and doing the sorting to look both at what is high use and what goes on my weeding list. I love walking through the stacks and getting more familiar with the collection. And I love pulling those unused and outdated items out of circulation. Within the community college setting I feel very strongly that books are for use. I'm sad when I see that 1997 copy of the Opposing Viewpoints on alcohol getting more recent circulations than the 2012 copy next to it. I've been doing a first pass level weeding at my current library: items that we've had since 1995 (the date of our ILS migration) and have never circulated, but I would love to be doing a much more thorough job.
Ever since I've been at Portland State, there has been a project to which I'd like to be able to fully commit. My predecessor received an LSTA grant to create a digital library of local and regional grey literature from community stakeholders regarding urban planning – the Oregon Sustainable Community Digital Library. (One of my liaison areas is Urban Studies and Planning.) The project was high profile, inventive and included creating and maintaining community relationships with local agencies and organizations. However, due to a variety of circumstances it hasn't been active, nor has the site been given any attention for quite some time.
Although I'm currently working with a team to assess the project and move it forward in some fashion, I don't know what that fashion will be. Had I the resources and time, I would dedicate an entire year to this project to make it what stakeholders and I wanted. It would mean getting into the community to talk to local agencies, organizations and faculty and student stakeholders; assessing the current collection; innovating ways to display its content and data; and incorporating all of these things into one meaningful, flexible and beautiful end product.
Maybe it's the nature of managing a smallish, solidly middle class public library, or maybe it's my lack of imagination, but my job doesn't seem to lend itself to focusing on one project to the exclusion of others. Fortunately, I'm able to supplement my day job with volunteer projects that reward sustained effort.
The volunteer project I'd like to spend next year working on is the one Kim alluded to in the editorial she published last October, specifically her discussion of turning words into action. These actions can be summarized as funding fellowships, organizing conferences, and providing venture capital. I'm particularly interested in that last idea: seeing if it's possible to apply to libraries what we've learned from innovative start-up incubators like YCombinator, Google Summer of Code, SXSW Accelerator, and maybe even the tongue-in-cheek Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud.
The George Street Carnival, a student-run literary journal at my institution, was revived in 2011 after a 3.5 year hiatus. If I had the chance to pick one project to focus my energy on for the next year, it would be to help that organization design a beautiful and streamlined online journal. The group of students working on the journal are amazingly talented and dedicated to showcasing the creative work of students, faculty, staff, and alumni (including poetry, fiction, and visual art). However, the journal is only offered in print. I'd love to help them expose the work to a broader audience, build the reputation of the publication, and maybe even digitize the past 37 years of print issues as a unique digital collection.
I would build a digital scholarship center/program at Florida State University. We are slowly working toward it and have some great folks involved already, but if I could dedicate all my time to making it happen in the next year, I would. In my mind this would encompass many of the things I'm interested in: securing financial support/grants, writing, brainstorming, working on teams with people I never get to work with, working with faculty in a new and different way, identifying the most interesting thing that we'd want to create, creating said thing, promotion and outreach about the project, then restarting the whole cycle. I'd really love to be actively involved in doing, making, building, participating, especially as things like the DPLA, PressForward and Anvil Academic are moving forward so quickly.
Don't make me pick one thing! No really, I don't want to. Please?
The truth is that my first librarian job in reference and instruction is also the first job I've ever had that never got boring. I tell people this all the time, non-librarian people, and they raise their eyebrows at me. I know what they're thinking. To the uninitiated, being a librarian sounds like the most boring job they could imagine, but the truth (according to me, anyway) is that we have one of the richest, most varied, and wonderfully complicated careers in the world. Of course, that's also what makes our jobs so challenging, since we have to juggle all those things and still try to maintain both our professionalism and our mental health. It's not always easy, but it definitely keeps things interesting.
Becoming a small library director has taken my love of variety to a whole new level: I've gone exponential! Not only do I get to do all the things I enjoyed as a reference and instruction librarian, but I've added, well, everything else that libraries do. All of it. It's a delight.
From @kenleyneufeld, "Are you writing/researching for the love, for the tenure?"
Both of my full time librarian positions have been with community colleges and while they both have something roughly akin to tenure, neither call it that and neither have a publishing requirement. So while I've transitioned to only editing here at Lead Pipe, I was writing and am editing and researching for the love, but also for the experience and the "it looks good on a resume" factor. I'm proud to have written what I have for Lead Pipe, and I definitely grew as a writer thanks to the review process, but I'm even more proud of how much I've grown as an editor.
Not that I should speak for anyone else, but I will: we all definitely do it for the love. For myself, never did nor do I currently see my participation in Lead Pipe because of promotion and tenure. (Although it doesn't mean I won't include my Lead Pipe activities as part of my annual reviews, third year review and tenure review!)
When we started Lead Pipe I was frustrated with the library profession and its discourse. I was a new librarian (just out of school one year!) who had endured a very unfulfilling Emerging Leaders experience and was already in my fourth post-degree job.((For more on this multiple jobs experience, see my Struggling to Juggle article from February 2011.)) I was hungry to have my voice, my thoughts and ideas heard. When Kim approached me to join this forming group blog I jumped at the opportunity. I had no thoughts regarding my career, promotion or tenure (I wasn't in a tenure-related position at the time)–I just wanted a platform to contribute my ideas and to participate in professional discourse.
I completed both my MLS and MIS in 2007, but I did not have a "permanent" job until February 2012. (I am currently serving under my ninth job title, and the first that is an actual line-item on my library's budget.) Throughout my career the one thing that has been steadfast has been working with this publication and with this group of people. It is my community and it is my librarian home. That's why I do it.
I write because I don't know what it feels like not to write, and I don't ever want to find out. Fortunately, we're in a profession that values writing and offers many opportunities for those of us who wish to publish. Unfortunately, our profession also frequently requires people who don't wish to write to come up with something publishable in order to meet their tenure requirements.
For me, both. Like Brett, I love writing and couldn't imagine my life without it. I've had my own blog since 2008 which has been an outlet for my journey as a library school student and professional librarian. When I was invited to join the Lead Pipe, I knew that it would be a great opportunity to move beyond my comfort zone (doing more research-based, peer-reviewed writing versus the very casual posts I do on my own blog) and get experience with project management, group dynamics, and editing. I'm in my fifth year at my institution and just submitted my tenure and promotion applications this past November. I was definitely thinking about those things when I accepted the invitation to join the Editorial Board. I wasn't just thinking about the importance of having Lead Pipe publications and responsibilities on my CV (although they are there, of course). I am also interested in sparking conversations on my campus about open ethos and non-traditional scholarly publishing. I figured that one of the best ways to "put my money where my mouth is" was to include Lead Pipe articles in my tenure application as peer-reviewed articles and include information about the importance of our journal within the field of librarianship (including some alt metrics). I am hoping that this inclusion will create conversation and debate among the Tenure and Promotion Committee when they review my applications this spring. Hopefully we can move toward the point where these new types of open scholarship are viewed on par with publishing a book or article in a traditional journal.
In my case, librarians at Florida State are non-tenure track, so to answer the question as asked, I write for love of the game. But, I would say that I also write for reputation and thinking about the future of my career as a librarian, which is sort of a "tenure-ish" sense of doing. I'm committed to the idea of "Big Tent Librarianship" and writing for a publication like In The Library with the Lead Pipe causes me to be engaged with new and different ideas that circulate through the field. There's also that underlying thing where I just plain feel like I have something to say, and learning to write for the web has helped me express ideas that I might not have expressed elsewhere. I am very interested in the structures of promotion and tenure, especially as applied to librarians, and I hope that there will be many more productive conversations about where writing fits into our professional practice. I'm glad to (hopefully) be a part of those discussions.
I write for the fame and fortune! I hear the check's in the mail.
And I write for the same reasons as Brett: because I can't not. I make sense of the world by putting my fingers on a keyboard and seeing what comes out. I make sense of my work in the same way. A friend of mine recently fell in love with the idea of using dictation software to write. He thought it would be much easier to talk into a microphone and "magically" compose articles and other documents without having to write or type. I'm the absolute opposite; I need to see words appear on a page or screen in order to fully process ideas and feelings. I wouldn't call it "love," exactly, because while the process is rewarding I don't necessarily enjoy it. But I do find it valuable and necessary to the way I live and work. If there are some professional benefits, that's just a bonus.
What was the most inspiring idea you encountered this past year?
I'm going to go with this ALA panel: Insert Catchy Label Here or the End of Gen Y, Digital Natives and the Millennial Student Myth, in particular Virginia Eubanks. I like to call myself a technophile Luddite. I trend towards early adopter in my personal life, but I do a lot of very basic tech support and computer help at the reference desk and balk at high tech movements in libraries. My students can't afford their textbooks, they definitely don't have iPads and most don't have smartphones. This talk gave me another perspective on the assumptions we (on this side of the digital divide) make about technology and how best to combat the digital divide.
The month of November was really inspiring this year. During November I participated in two community writing events, both of which were organized and conducted using social media: Academic Writing Month (Acwrimo) and Digital Writing Month (Digiwrimo). They are both challenges asking authors to write 50,000 words in one month, or to set some ridiculous writing goals and to do their damndest to achieve them. Although November seems to have been some sort of writing month for quite some time, with National Novel Writing Month beginning in 1999, the idea was novel to me, and 2012 was the first year Digiwrimo existed.
During November I attempted to write seven hours a week, and I think I just about did it. Without Acwrimo or Digiwrimo, this would definitely not have happened. My next article at Lead Pipe will probably address my experiences with these events, and engage the idea of librarians as writers. So, more to come!
I'm not as methodical in my self-testing as Seth Roberts and others who are leading self-tracked lives, but I like to experiment with new ways of doing things to see how they feel for me. The most effective techniques I've found in the past year involve intervals and repetition, the kinds of technique that Erica Jesonis discussed in her Lead Pipe article. For me, it's Pomodoros at work (I like Tomato Timer) and Tabatas at home (I like the free version of the Seconds interval timer), plus I incorporate intervals in one of my runs each week. Also, while it's not exactly interval training, I found BJ Fogg's free, weeklong, 3 Tiny Habits course to be useful in much the same way: small tasks, clearly defined, associated with reasonable expectations, and repeated at sensible intervals.
I'm very excited about Librarian Design Share, launched in early December by April Aultman Becker and Veronica Arellano Douglas. The design of the visual tools we use in libraries (handouts, web graphics, signage) is important and I think this kind of resource will inspire library communities to think more creatively about sharing their message, whatever that message happens to be at the moment.
I draw inspiration from so many different things, it'd be difficult to narrow it down to one idea. This year I read much less professionally, but much more personally. I started my first job. I listened to a lot more music, and saw a lot fewer movies. I bought a home, voted for a president and am preparing for a first child. I left something behind and joined something new.
There are a few stand out things that have stuck with me through it all. I had the opportunity to see Henry Rollins speak here in Tallahassee in October. Aside from the fan boy, "OMG that is actually HENRY freaking ROLLINS" thing, he said some things that sunk in. He said all around the world when he asks people what they want they most often say "a little water." I still don't really know what to do with that, but I think about it all the time.
Professionally, I have returned many times to two articles: Giving it away by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Reality Bytes by Bethany Nowviskie. Both talk about the future directions of academia, and by extension the academic library, in the context of higher education, and both are from the perspectives of not necessarily librarians, which I tend to think is in incredibly valuable perspective to consider. I could quote these to bits, but I'd encourage you to take a few minutes and just glance through them. The idea that I've pulled from these is that things are changing, and for the better, and that there are opportunities to be involved in good, new work. That has really defined my year, and I hope it continues to for years to come.
A fun, slightly quirky, inspiring idea that I've been revisiting and rehashing all year comes from a book called The Library 2025 (forthcoming from ALA Editions) that I'm editing with former Lead Piper Eric Frierson. The book is a collection of visionary essays about the future of libraries, and one chapter compares future librarians to park rangers. Now it may be that my nature-loving, granola-munching past is an influence here, but the metaphor of librarian as park ranger strikes me just right: I love thinking about the world of information as an environment that we inhabit just as we inhabit an ecosystem or landscape. I also love the idea of librarians as individuals who would have a home base (the park lodge/office) but would also rove the landscape to help people at the point of need. The idea is a little mindbending and the essay itself is both realistic and deeply imaginative. All in all, my props go to Hugh Rundle for lighting up my brain with the vision of librarian park rangers. The more I think about it, the better I like it.
And, of course, I'm eager to see the uniforms.
3 Responses
Thanks for sharing this. I loved reading everyone's perspectives looking backwards and forwards. And while I feel slightly ashamed to say this, it was a nice holiday break to read an ITLWTLP article that was skim-able and that didn't require deep, soul-searching thinking :) I'm particularly struck by Kim's description of the "uninitiated" – I too struggle to convey to my friends, family and patrons the wide (and fascinating) array of work we tackle on a regular basis. This post reflects that spectrum really well and it makes me excited for a new year in Library Land. Thanks, writers.


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Conservapedia's In the News feature is a news feed reporting on current events. It is meant to be informative and thought-provoking on sometimes controversial topics and is separate from, but often links to the encyclopedic articles of the site. It accumulates the most interesting and important news for all readers, drawing from a wide range of news outlets. All these stories are presented in one convenient place, located on the right-hand column of Conservapedia's main page. In the News is distinguished from similar news sources by the readily available access to informational pages about people and events via links directly to Conservapedia's entries.
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Fun Bike Unicorn Club – Todd Barricklow , through the Fun Bike Unicorn Club, works metal into unique pedal-powered vehicles. His designs often start from just a sketch, and completed through a process of trial-and-error. He came to Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 to ride his creations.
Subscribe to the Maker Faire Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.
Check out more videos from Maker Faire Bay Area 2011.
Join Make: Community Today


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"Welcome to FM ACOUSTICS of Switzerland. The choice of leading artists."
"The best for those who require the best"... is a valid description of FM ACOUSTICS' philosophy but it does not matter how we are described; be it as "maniacs", as "obsessed with accuracy" or as "incurable perfectionists", any description is fine as long as our efforts to achieve the ultimate can continue unabated.
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By remaining completely independent, funding its own R&D, going a different path and staying faithful to its philosophy, FM ACOUSTICS can create better products free of obsolescence, musically accurate units that massively improve the State of the Art in recording and reproduction; all this while remaining a dedicated, clearly focused and successful family owned company.


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About Bridgman
The Bridgman Advantage
Narrative compliments of The Bridgman/Lake Township Historical Society.
In the fall of 1856, George Bridgman (1813-1895) along with his partners Warren Howe and Charles F. Howe formed the Charlotte Lumber Company. A large steam powered sawmill was set up near the present intersection of Lake Street and Red Arrow Highway. A narrow-gauge railway was constructed, running from the mill to the lake with several branches into the timber. There was about seven miles of track and the rolling stock included the engine and approximately thirty-three cars. The area around the mill became known as Charlotteville in honor of Mr. Howe's wife Charlotte. Fire was the fate for this mill in 1863. Two subsequent mills were erected on the same site, both succumbing to fire. When the last mill was destroyed in 1870, the Howes moved on to other pursuits.
George Bridgman decided to stay in the area. Having acquired several hundred acres of land, including most of present day Bridgman, he and other residents began growing fruit trees, grapes and berry plants. The market for produce was limited to what to could be sold locally. In 1869, Mr. Bridgman entered into an agreement with the Chicago Michigan and Lakeshore Railroad, granting the company right-of-way through his land. In return for that, along with a reliable supply of water, the railroad agreed to erect and maintain a depot. In 1871 the depot was erected and the railroad company assigned it the name "Bridgman". The post office designation was also changed to Bridgman that same year.
Growing Bridgman
The nursery business exploded in Bridgman. In 1888, Ozro Baldwin noticed that his raspberry plants had an unusually large amount of suckers. He ran a three line ad for the plants in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania "Farm Journal". He received orders for all the plants. In the spring of 1889, several hundred folders were sent out quoting prices for strawberry and cane plants. The mail order nursery business would become a million-dollar industry in Bridgman. Many names can be associated with the nursery business; Baldwin, Weston, Whitten, Ackerman, Stahelin, Essig, Dass and Rokely. The Kreiger and Rambo families, who were not in the retail and mail order trade, operated successful wholesale nurseries that still exist in Bridgman.
Originally owned by Lake Township, the Lake Michigan shoreline in Bridgman became popular in the 20's. Weko Beach, named for partners Henry Weber and Bruno Kolander who built a pavilion on the waterfront, became a destination for residents and visitors from all around, especially Chicago. The pavilion served homemade fish and chicken dinners, held dances and hosted concerts by a group of Chicago Symphony members. In 1945, Henry and Bruno dissolved their partnership and the pavilion (beach house as it was called by now) remained open to the public as a concession type venue. The City of Bridgman purchased the property from Lake Township in 1958. With the assistance of grant funds from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the City was able to do a much needed renovation at the beach house in 1989. The renovation, completed in 1991, retained little of the original structure, with the exception of the foundation and the wood flooring in the large room overlooking the lake. This once popular building continues to provide food, fun and sun for residents and visitors.


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The E.P.I.C. integrated prompting system has become the number one broadcast on-camera monitor in the world because of its unique design which combines a high-bright prompting screen with an integrated talent monitor. Now, as part of the Intelligent Prompting system development, E.P.I.C. has been enhanced to offer the ultimate connectivity and flexibility.
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The Environmental Crisis in Latin America
The Environmental Crisis in Latin America
- Guillermo Castro H.Guillermo Castro H.Guillermo Castro H. Panamá, 1950. PhD in Latin American Studies, Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), 1995. Vice President of Research and Learning at the City of Knowledge Foundation, Panama.
An environmental crisis is neither the result of a single factor nor of a combination of such. On the contrary, it results from a complex combination of modes of interaction between natural and social systems, operating for periods in time and space. This holds true for the environmental crisis in Latin America, understood within the context of the first global environmental crisis in the history of our species. The combination of facts and processes with respect to the crisis in Latin America is associated with three distinct and interdependent historical periods: (1) The first period, one of long duration, marks the interaction with the natural world of the first humans to occupy the Americas and encompasses a timespan of at least 15,000 years before the European conquest of 1500–1550. (2) The second period, one of medium duration, corresponds to European control of the region between the 16th and 19th centuries, a timespan that witnessed the creation of tributary societies grounded in noncapitalist forms of organization, such as the indigenous commune, feudal primogeniture, and the great ecclesiastical properties, which were characteristics of peripheral economies that existed within the wider framework of the emerging modern global economic system. (3) The third period, one of shorter duration, extended from 1870 to 1970 during which capitalist forms of relationships between social systems and natural systems in the region developed. This period was succeeded, beginning about 1980, by decades of transition and crisis, a process that is still ongoing.
In this transition, old and unresolved conflicts reemerge in a new context, which combines indigenous and peasant resistance to incorporation into a market economy with the fight of urban dwellers for access to the basic environmental conditions for life, such as safe drinking water, waste disposal, energy, and clean air. In this scenario, a culture of nature is taking shape, which combines general democratic demands with values and visions from indigenous and African American cultures and those of a middle-class intellectuality increasingly linked to global environmentalism. This culture faces state policies often associated with the interests of transnational corporations and complex negotiation processes for agreements on global environmental problems. In this process, the actions of the past have led to the emergence of a great diversity of development options, all of which are centered in one basic fact: that, in Latin America as elsewhere around the word, if we want a different environment we need to create different societies.
- History of Latin America and the Oceanic World
- Environmental History
At first glance, the environmental crisis facing Latin America today is reminiscent of the one experienced in northwestern Europe in the early 19th century as a result of the first Industrial Revolution: a combination of economic growth with social decline and environmental degradation that was characterized by the overexploitation of natural resources, disorderly urban expansion, and massive pollution of air, water, and soil. Nevertheless, differences in scale, time, culture, and function in the development of the modern world system go beyond this comparison.
Indeed, at that time Great Britain, France, and Germany had a combined population of around 60 million inhabiting an area of just over one and a quarter million square kilometers. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution that was concentrated there also helped to accelerate the process of organizing the first global market in the history of mankind, structured around a center-periphery relationship, one that consisted of the nations of the North Atlantic at the center and Latin America, Africa, and Asia at the periphery.
Latin America and the Caribbean then counted about 15 million inhabitants, of whom more than 90 percent lived in rural areas spread over a territory of more than 21 million square kilometers. The route that would eventually become a major supplier of minerals, food, and raw materials for the North Atlantic economies, then in the process of becoming the world's industrial workshop, was just opening up. Without a doubt, the ecological footprint associated with the European process, which would eventually generate the global environmental crisis that the world now faces, was felt in Latin America as early as the 16th century. It intensified in the mid-19th century, as the region became a supplier of food, minerals, and other raw materials then in demand by the nations that composed the industrial workshop. They continue to play that role today and these products are in demand by those economies that have followed the model set by the North Atlantic countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
Nevertheless, the present situation is, in fact, entirely new. Latin America now has a population of nearly 600 million, of whom about 80 percent live in urban areas, and the continent includes four megacities—Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro—where, in total, more than 55 million people reside. In addition, since the mid-1990s the region has become the most important resource frontier in the global economy through a process of massive transformation of the natural heritage of the indigenous and rural populations into natural capital to serve the global economy.1
As part of this same process, Latin America has also evolved into one of the most important centers in the development of new environmental thinking, which draws on three main sources: a tradition of examination into and research on the economic and social problems in the region that can be traced to the late 18th century and that finds expression today in important international institutions, such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which was created in 1948; the existence of a middle-class intelligentsia that is closely linked to the increasingly dense fabric of global environmentalism and to the new social movements in the countryside and urban fringes that have seen remarkable progress, especially in the defense of access to rights to natural resources and to a healthy environment. Hence, understanding the environmental crisis in Latin America involves two tasks: to explain it within Latin America and, at the same time, to understand it in the context of the global crisis. This article tackles that dual effort.
The Stages of Time
In his now classic 1990 essay "Transformations of the Earth," environmental historian Donald Worster identified the need to combine three levels of analysis, all of them interdependent, when addressing environmental problems from a historical perspective. The first consists of "the structure and distribution of natural environments in the past." The second includes production technology as it interacts with these environments and that stems from the concept of mode of production, which consists "not merely in organizing human labor and machinery but also in transforming nature" in a process that, in turn, leads to the restructuring of society itself. The third encompasses the "ideologies, ethics, laws and myths [that] have become part of an individual or group's dialogue with nature."2 This approach has great utility for the topic at hand.
The Space and Its Resources
The environmental crisis in Latin America is unfolding over an area of 22 million square kilometers, and it directly affects approximately 600 million people. The history of this area's ecosystems dates back to the formation of the land we know today, which—following the breakup of Pangea some 200 million years ago—culminated some 4 million years ago in the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, the physical link between the continental masses we know today as North America and South America. Latin America today encompasses a vast and complex diversity of ecosystems, ranging from extremely dry deserts to humid tropical rainforests and from marine-coastal wetlands to highlands some 4,000 meters in elevation.3
Describing these ecosystems in relation to the global environmental outlook is not simple, and requires reference to a wide variety of sources.4 For instance, the United Nations Population Fund notes that the region has "1995 million hectares, of which 576 million are arable reserves." The agency notes that, in 2000, the region had "25% of the world's forest areas, 92% of such located in Brazil and Peru," while Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela are "among the nations considered as biologically mega-diverse, and house between 60 and 70% of all life forms on Earth." Furthermore, the agency notes that Latin America "receives 29% of the world's rainfall, and has a third of its renewable water resources." The GEO 5 report, on the other hand, notes that the region contains approximately "23% of the world's forests; 31% of its fresh water resources, and six of the 17 mega-diverse countries in the world."5 Meanwhile, a report by ECLAC and UNASUR indicates that Latin America has important mineral and hydrocarbon reserves, and that its water reserves represent about 70 percent of the entire Western Hemisphere's reserves.6
At the same time, the region's most pressing environmental problems in the 21st century include vast and complex processes of soil degradation due to erosion and pollution; forest loss; decline of biodiversity due to habitat loss and fragmentation; deterioration of watersheds and watercourses related to increases in the demand for water; deterioration and overexploitation of coastal and marine resources; and accelerated deterioration of urban areas, which is manifested in an increase in the demand for basic services—water, sewer, power, waste collection—and translates into an ever-increasing ecological footprint.7 These issues, in turn, interact with—and are exacerbated by—a persistent combination of economic growth and social inequality, with the result that poverty persists among approximately 30 percent of the population. This results from an income distribution structure that, as indicated in a World Bank report, finds between 40 and 47 percent of the total income is concentrated among the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, while the poorest 20 percent own 2 to 4 percent of the total income.8
The Species and Its Development
The circumstances described above shape the conditions found in Latin America in a global crisis that, according to organizations such as the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere—an international coalition of scientists headquartered in Stanford University, California—poses five key threats to our species: climate change, extinctions, loss of ecosystem diversity, pollution, and increasing human population and resource consumption. The global nature of this crisis, and the part played by Latin America in it, calls for a historical approach that can be divided into three separate stages, which, when taken together, make up the background to the crisis that confronts the region.
The first of these stages corresponds to the lengthy period of the human presence in Latin America. This presence, in fact, dates back to more than fifteen thousand years of development prior to the European conquest of 1500–1550, which, through a wide range of modes of interaction with the environment, led to important developments in civilizational processes, particularly in Mesoamerica and the Andean altiplano. The second stage, of shorter duration, corresponds to the period of European control of Latin America. European colonial rule extended from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The interest, first, of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies in increasing income from their American colonial possessions and, then, of the dominant groups in their possessions to take on this task for their own benefit led to the breakdown during the period between 1750 and 1850 of tributary societies grounded in noncapitalist forms of economic organization, such as the indigenous commune, feudal primogeniture, and large church properties. For this reason, as well, such control operated where the conditions—manpower, resources, and access to communication routes with Europe—that made it possible and necessary existed, but they did so only nominally where they did not.9
Finally, the third stage—shorter but much more intense in regard to its environmental consequences—covers the period between 1870 and 1970 and corresponds to the development of capitalist forms of interaction between the social systems and the natural systems in the region. A process of crisis and transition began about 1980, one that is still ongoing. The starting point for this third stage is the liberal reform efforts undertaken by the newly independent regimes following the revolutions of 1810, which by 1875 had succeeded in creating the land and labor markets needed to make way for capitalist ways of organizing the relations between the new national societies and their natural environment. Hence, the growing demand for commodities in the nations of the North Atlantic was met by means of entirely new mining and agricultural enterprises, especially in areas that had often, up to that point, been marginally important. Such was the case in Guatemala, which saw the transformation of large areas of cloud forest into coffee plantations, as described by José Martí in the well-known writing that he dedicated to Guatemala in 1878.10
This process saw sustained economic and technological expansion throughout most of the 20th century under very different forms of political, economic, and technological organizations that ranged from semi-servile peonage in oligarchic holdings to the creation of foreign capital enclaves and protected markets for state-owned enterprises. The consequences of these developments were summarized by Chilean geographer Pedro Cunill:
During the historical period comprised between 1930 and 1990, a sustained settlement process of the Latin American geography, which covers 20 446 082 km2 of continental and insular lands, became evident. We see a persistent tendency to concentrate consolidated and sub-integrated cityscapes, as well as significant spontaneous occupation of traditionally unpopulated areas, particularly in the interior and southern parts of South America. These geo-historical transformations have put an end to the collective illusion of preserving Latin America as a whole, a territory with extensive, virtually untouched, landscapes and unlimited natural resources.11
This development, adds Cunill, brought the end of "the unlimited and inexhaustible Latin American spaces," which have ceased to function as barriers to economic development. "National societies," he states, "when configuring their boundaries, framed in their historical evolution, with progresses and contradictions, have even gone beyond the apparent natural boundaries, which until the late forties seemed insurmountable, especially in the South American interior."12 From then on, a dual process of urban growth and transformation of the inner regions into resource frontiers began, one closely associated with the power structures that perpetuate the uneven access to the fruits of economic growth, a scenario that is at the very core of the current environmental crisis in Latin America.
The greatest difficulty in understanding this crisis lies in how all the stages of the historical process that has led to the transition period expressed by such crisis are operating. None of the above processes are, in fact, self-contained. On the contrary, each one provides premises and consequences that help define the next one. So, for instance, the fact that the Western Hemisphere was the last to be occupied by humans in their expansion across the planet, and the fact that this happened some ten thousand years before humans developed agriculture and sixteen thousand years before the use of metals is a contributing factor to the role of natural resource reserve that Latin America plays in the global environmental crisis.
In addition, when these changes took place in Eurasia and Africa, humans in the Americas were already isolated from the rest of the world and so had to acquire skills without the benefit of technological and cultural exchange, which favored those living in these other regions so significantly.13 Thus, when the European conquest started, the most advanced native societies were just beginning their transition into the use of metals and, thus, mineral deposits in Latin America were virtually intact. Also, the domestication of large animal species did not occur, although the modification of the natural ecosystems by a relatively late, but already very sophisticated, agriculture, especially in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizational cores, was quite advanced. Moreover, all forms of relationships with nature that emerged prior to the acquisition of the use of metals—save for pastoral nomadism—were present in Latin America, which therefore included an amazing diversity of cultures and social and political organizational types ranging from nomadic bands dedicated to hunting and gathering to state formations that some have deemed as "Mesopotamian-like," grounded on the labor of agrarian communities.
The conquest had a significant demographic, social, political, cultural, and environmental impact, which manifested itself in the radical transformation of the region's land use and landscapes. In this regard, estimates of the native population of in the Americas at the time of first European contact vary from a maximum of 90 to 150 million people to a minimum of 40 to 60 million. In any case, agreement is general about the magnitude of the decline that took place. The indigenous population is estimated to have been reduced by about 75 to 95 percent over the first one hundred years of the conquest. Other estimates indicate that, at the moment of contact, the American population represented close to 20 percent of all humanity, which was subsequently reduced to 3 percent a century later, only to begin a recovery in the mid-18th century.14 Even so, this overall reduction had a lesser impact on the areas of greater cultural development and a greater impact on those areas that were less developed, with consequences that extend to the present day.
In any case, after a complex transition process, which for native societies took on an apocalyptic character, the new Iberoamerica came to be organized "from the outside and from the top," into a network of human settlements organized around centers of economic activity—mining, at first, and then also agricultural—that relied on servile labor, in places such as Mesoamerica and the Andean altiplano, or slave labor, especially in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of Central and South America. The new societies that emerged from this process can be grouped into four major types.
One of them had, and undoubtedly still has, a clear Indoamerican character. Both the feudal culture of the conquerors and certain features "of pre-Hispanic political organization in the core areas," contributed to its formation as well as "the stratification of their societies with marked differences between the elite and those they ruled over," which "facilitated colonial domination." The peasant masses of Mesoamerica and the Andean altiplano, aside from constituting the largest concentrations of people at the time of the conquest, were accustomed to obeying and paying tribute to the various administrative agencies of the local rulers. Wars of plunder and conquest were common among pre-Hispanic chiefdoms. They often fell under foreign rule and were forced to pay tribute, to accept settlers and new ruling dynasties, and to adopt different religious cults.15
The fact that "due to the high population density in the core areas (Mesoamerica and the Andean Region), a major demographic remnant" survived, "from which a new population increase was subsequently initiated," also contributed to this incorporation, while "in the regions inhabited by tribal groups and chiefdoms," the combination of overexploitation, epidemics, and breakdown of all previous ways of life led to "the near extinction of the indigenous population, of which only isolated groups survived."16
The importation of African slaves to compensate for the loss of indigenous labor, particularly in the Caribbean and in northeastern Brazil, accelerated between the late 18th and mid-19th centuries to meet European and North American demand for goods such as sugar, coffee, and cocoa, and it resulted in the formation of an African American society with particular sociocultural and productive characteristics.17 Two other societies emerged: a mestizo society with a strong European presence, found in the agro-livestock areas of the lower Río de la Plata Basin and in the center of Chile, and a society that appeared in vast areas of the interior that were transformed into places of refuge for indigenous, mestizo, and Afro-American populations, where, free from colonial control, they returned to nonmarket forms of production and consumption.
A vast resource frontier emerged in these inner regions—some resources remained unexploited while others were restored, such as the forests that began to appear in areas that had been previously cultivated in Darién in Panama, the Mesoamerican Atlantic coast, Amazonia, and the southern tip of Argentina and Chile. Except for the latter area, which was annexed by their respective nations between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of these inner regions would remain outside the market system until the mid- to late 20th century, as Pedro Cunill points out.
The Culture
The crisis currently faced by Latin American societies in their relationship with the natural world also includes a crisis of views. Just as the crisis engendered by the 16th-century contradictions and conflicts between the cultures of the conquered and the conquerors reemerged, after the liberal reforms from 1825 to 1875, in the conflict between expropriators and expropriated, so the increasingly important role played by large North Atlantic and Asian corporations as the main organizers of the exploitation of natural resources in the region shapes today's crisis.
The dominant feature in the Latin American culture of nature has been, and to a large extent still is, the obvious disjuncture between the views of those who dominate and those who are dominated with respect to the organization of relations between societies and their natural environment in the region. This contradiction is manifested in the coexistence—usually passive but sometimes antagonistic—between a dominant culture that has evolved around ideals that are aligned with North Atlantic views—such as, first, civilization versus barbarism; then progress versus backwardness; and, finally, development versus underdevelopment—and a set of subordinated cultures—especially with indigenous and African American roots—that have evolved from other roots during a constant struggle against the dominant views.
In this regard, another important role was played by the fact that, as noted by Antonio Gramsci in the early 1930s, the basic structures of cultural organization in Latin American societies up to the early 20th century corresponded to "the Spanish and Portuguese civilization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characterized by the Counter Reformation and militarism." In such structures, he adds, the dominant intellectual categories were "the clergy and the army," to which can be added the scholars serving in the state administration. Under such circumstances, in societies organized around large land properties, with a very limited industrial base and lacking complex superstructures, "the majority of intellectuals are of the rural kind … linked to the clergy and to large landowners."18
In contrast to the North Atlantic world, in the 18th and 19th centuries Latin America lacked a vigorous and well-educated intellectual middle class, one able to express the general interests of the region's societies. These kinds of social groups had been present in North Atlantic societies since at least the late 18th century, and produced scientists from modest backgrounds, such as Alfred Russell Wallace, who, on the basis of their achievements, could act as interlocutors with their peers from higher social origins, such as Charles Darwin. Indeed, in Latin America, the concentration of land ownership in the hands of an oligarchic caste blocked the development of the kind of rural middle class that produced intellectuals like Gilbert White in Great Britain and Henry David Thoreau in the United States, during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Thus, the birth of a culture of nature in Latin America witnessed a division between a dominant oligarchic view, centered on a vision of civilization's struggle against barbarism, and multitude popular views, which are close to animism and have a strong community character. Hence, in the great works produced by those who exemplify the dominant view, which depict the formation of modern national identities—from José Rivera's La Vorágine [The vortex] and Romulo Gallegos's Doña Barbara to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Mario Vargas Llosa's La Casa Verde [The green house]—nature is portrayed as a menacing element, which in the end escapes all rational control. On the other hand, popular culture displays a more celebratory tone, which in the early 21st century is exemplified in the exquisitely expressive music of artists such as the Dominican Juan Luis Guerra, or in the rich and dense dialogue between man and nature in the works of Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas.
The big exception in this split scenario is found, undoubtedly, in the works of José Martí, who employs more polished expressions—especially in Nuestra América [Our America], written in 1891 and a work that marks the true birth certificate of our contemporary life—that characterize nature as a cultural and political category to be constructed from the reality it expresses. Yet, Martí's work is exceptional, reflective of his exile in New York between 1881 and 1895 during which he maintained a constant dialogue—"from the standpoint of the Latin American liberalism crisis of the time"—with the culture of nature as expressed in the works of authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who were clearly linked to the best democratic traditions of North American society.19
In Latin America, modern intelligentsia of the type represented by these authors took shape only with the industrial expansion and urban development that characterized the second half of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1980s, this intelligentsia became active, and its worldview rejected the notion that mere economic growth offered evidence of the fruits of progress and advancement toward civilization through development. Instead, it expressed a growing concern about the obviously unsustainable nature of such development, based as it is on the continuous expansion of the export of raw materials to other economies.20
In the 21st century, this process of cultural maturity has intensified. From the top, so to speak, the region has seen remarkable growth in the quality of its environmental institutions, which, in turn, has taken—without solving it—the conflict between extractive economic growth and the sustainability of human development to the very heart of the societies. From the bottom, resistance by indigenous and peasant populations to the expropriation of their natural heritage, and the fight for their political rights, is joined by the struggle of the urban middle and lower classes for their basic environmental rights. These efforts promote the development of a nonconformist environmentalism, which, in Latin American societies today, can look to a mythical past prior to the European conquest when harmonious relationships with nature prevailed and which is able to confront the processes of economic growth that have brought with them social deterioration and environmental degradation.21
In this context, an active intellectual activity is ongoing in Latin America, one that, from the standpoint of the humanities, the sciences, and the arts, expresses what Enrique Leff has deemed the region's "new environmental thinking."22 Formed on the basis of the best Western academic traditions, and in close contact with the new social movements in the region, this intelligentsia has joined Latin American environmentalism with global environmentalism, on the one hand, while, on the other, it has done the same with the processes of political, social, cultural, environmental, and economic transformation that are underway in the region.23 Today, this intelligentsia is involved, alongside colleagues from around the world, in the development of new fields of knowledge, such as environmental history, political ecology, and ecological economics, and its products in all of these fields are already an integral part of the environmental culture that has emerged from the global crisis.
Growing with the World, to Help It Change
The environmental crisis is part of unprecedented historical developments consequent to the rise of the modern world system, which manifests itself as a change of time rather than a time of change. With respect to Latin America, the environmental crisis is part of a transition period in which old, unresolved conflicts have reemerged, in the context of entirely new situations, and a new culture of respect for nature is taking shape, one that combines broad democratic claims with values and visions from indigenous, African American, and mestizo cultures, and from a middle-class intelligentsia that is increasingly linked to global environmentalism.
Such culture is shaped both by dialogue and by confrontation between its own components as much as by confrontation with state policies, often closely associated with the interests of international financial organizations, and by complex processes to seek agreements on environmental issues within the interstate system. In this double transition process, all the past acts at all present moments. The technical legitimacy advanced by state policies confronts the historical and cultural legitimacy of the movements pitted against them, resulting in a process that generates development options with extraordinary vigor and diversity.
From this perspective, the cultural dimension of the crisis, that is, the source of the new questions that generate innovative responses, is not the mere sum of the ecological, economic, technological, social, and political dimensions, but of the interactions among them.24 From such a synthesis there now emerges in the Latin American culture of nature as a factor of decisive political importance a conclusion that can be as comforting to some as it is unsettling to others, but one that is, nevertheless, unavoidable for all. Indeed, to the extent that the environment is the result of the interactions between society and its natural surroundings over time, if a different environment is desired, the creation of a different society is needed.
This is the main challenge posed by the environmental crisis in Latin America, as in every society elsewhere. Precisely for this reason, the transformations, conflicts, ruptures, and possible solutions that are currently taking place in the Latin American socio-environmental order also define the terms under which Latin America participates in the global environmental crisis, and they pose problems that need to be solved from within the region through dialogue and cooperation with other societies around the world. We grow with the world, so we can help it change.
Discussion of the Literature
Scholarship trends in the debate concerning the environmental crisis in Latin America are concentrated in three main fields: environmental history, political ecology, and environmental economics. There are two main trends in the environmental history of Latin America. One trend, of regional origin, is the Latin American environmental history that has emerged as a field of study in conjunction with the development of the region's culture of nature in close association with the new social movements of the 21st century. Guillermo Castro's Naturaleza y sociedad en la historia de América Latina, José Augusto Padua's Un sopro de destruçao, and Reinaldo Funes's De los bosques a los cañaverales: Una historia ambiental de Cuba, 1492–1926, are prominent examples. Research in this trend in Latin American environmental history is characterized by a broad, systemic approach to the subject, an importance given to long-term and middle-term processes, and an emphasis placed on regional and subregional aspects of these processes as well as on the relevance of sociocultural aspects in this development. These characteristics are, of course, indebted to the legacy of the French École des Annales and to traditions of dialectical thinking present in the works of authors such as José Martí as early as the late 19th century.
A much wider and better known trend is the environmental history of Latin America that has been developed by authors from this and other regions in close association with the North Atlantic research and academic systems. Its characteristics include an in-depth analysis of specific situations, a more quantitative approach, the assumption of the nation-state as a unit of analysis, and a much more modest approach to theoretical elaboration from the results of historical research. An example of this trend is J. Timmons Roberts and Nikki Denetria Thanos, Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crisis in Latin America, which approaches the crisis through a description and analysis of several different cases. It is important to note that the establishment of the Latin American and Caribbean Association of Environmental History (SOLCHA), open from its beginning to participation by historians from the North Atlantic region, has facilitated collaboration of member researchers, who have authored books, such as Naturaleza en Declive, edited by Reinaldo Funes, that provide an interesting example of the results that can be attained by interaction of scholars associated with both trends.
With respect to the field of political ecology, one especially active since disenchantment by environmentalist social movements with the failure to achieve practical results following Rio 92, at least three new currents of thought and intellectual output have emerged in the region. The most visible is made of a varied set of trends and intellectual personalities, which Mexican philosopher Enrique Leff designates as the "new environmental thinking." This current of thought is characterized by a deep ethical character, both culturally and politically, reclaiming the role of rural and urban poor community organizations as agents in a process that aims to create a different environment by building a different society. The school of thought joins together figures such as Catalan economist Joan Martínez Alier, Mexican humanist Victor Toledo, Argentine popular educator Carlos Galano, and Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, who, through their work, are shaping to a cultural movement of extraordinary vitality.
The other two currents include, first, one inspired by neoliberal thought, which advocates addressing environmental problems through the use of technology, allowing the market to allocate resources with the least possible interference from the state, and the promotion of the so-called green economy. Its prominent proponents include Gabriel Quadri from Mexico. The other current could be called neosocialist—some call it eco-Marxist. It views the environmental crisis as the manifestation of the general crisis of capitalism on a global scale. This trend considers the relationship between society and nature as an expression of the socioeconomic structures prevalent in the region, and it promotes social control of public management by strengthening the capacity and authority of organizations of manual and intellectual workers, both from the countryside and from the cities. Noteworthy publications reflecting these viewpoints include Herramienta [tool] magazine, published in Argentina.
However significant their differences may be, Latin American neoliberalism and neosocialism share some key features, which include a tendency to combine abstract generalization and pragmatic particularization in their analyses. Adherents of both schools in Latin America also maintain close ties with their counterparts in other regions of the world: on the one hand, with the global network of think tanks associated with international financial institutions and, on the other, with academics linked to neo-Marxist currents in North Atlantic countries, such as U.S. economists James O'Connor and John Bellamy Foster. The key issue, in any case, is their link with the entirety of Latin American environmental thought through the contributions they make to the debates that encourage the further development of that thought.
Primary Sources
In quantitative terms, the two most important primary sources essential in research into the problems associated with the environmental crisis in Latin America are, first, the series of Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) reports published since 2000 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and second, the various statistical series, articles, and compilations on environmental issues published since 1980 by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In both instances, however, the reader should note that these are intergovernmental agencies that gather information according to their own policy agendas, which center on the major themes of international research, such as climate change, sustainable development, and the so-called green economy.
Further Reading
- Boff, Leonardo. Ecología: Grito de la tierra, grito de los pobres. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2011.
- Burkart, Rodolfo, Beatriz Marchetti, and Jorge Morello. "Grandes ecosistemas de México y Centroamérica." In El futuro ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina. Edited by Gilberto C. Gallopín, 101–163. Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de las Naciones Unidas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
- Castro Herrera, Guillermo. Naturaleza y sociedad en la historia de América Latina. Panama City: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Justo Arosemena, 1995.
- Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe and Unión de Naciones del Sur. Recursos naturales en UNASUR: Situación y tendencias para una agenda de desarrollo regional. Santiago de Chile: United Nations, 2013.
- Cunill, Pedro. Las transformaciones del espacio geohistórico latinoamericano, 1930–1990. Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
- Damascos, María A., Nélida M. Gazia, and Gilberto C. Gallopín, eds. "Consecuencias de la transformación de los ecosistemas de la América Latina. Estudios de caso." In El futuro ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina. Edited by Gilberto C. Gallopín, 11–121. Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de las Naciones Unidas/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
- de Ferranti, David, Guillermo E. Perry, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, and Michael Walton. Desigualdad en América Latina y el Caribe: ¿Ruptura con la historia? Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003.
- Fondo de las Naciones Unidas para Actividades de Población. "Población y desarrollo en América Latina." Accessed August, 2014.
- Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, ed. Naturaleza en declive. Valencia, Spain: Fundación Instituto de Historia Social. 2008. The anthology includes essays by Guillermo Castro Herrera, Sterling Evnas, Reinaldo Funes, Stefania Gallini, Manuel González de Molina, Antonio Herrera, Regina Horta, Paulo Martinez, John McNeill, Antonio Ortega, John Soluri, David Soto, and Tortolero Alenjandro.
- Gallopín, Gilberto C. "Medio ambiente, desarrollo y cambio tecnológico en la América Latina." In El futuro ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina. Edited by Gilberto C. Gallopín, 483–539. Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de las Naciones Unidas/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
- Gallopín, Gilberto C., ed. El futuro ecológico de un continente. Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina. Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de las Naciones Unidas/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
- Gallopín, Gilberto C. Sostenibilidad y desarrollo sostenible: Un enfoque sistémico. Serie Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo No. 64. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, División de Desarrollo Sostenible y Asentamientos Humanos, 2003.
- Gelman, Jorge. "Senderos que se bifurcan: Las economías de América Latina luego de las independencias." In Institucionalidad y desarrollo económico en América Latina. Project document compiled by Osvaldo Kacef and Pablo Gerchunoff. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, 2011.
- Gramsci, Antonio. "Apuntes de filosofía. Materialismo e idealismo." In Cuadernos de la Cárcel. Notebook 4: 1930–1932. Edición crítica del Instituto Gramsci. Mexico City: Ediciones ERA, 1999.
- Kalmanovitz, Salomón. "Las consecuencias económicas de la independencia en América Latina." In Institucionalidad y desarrollo económico en América Latina. Project document compiled by Osvaldo Kacef and Pablo Gerchunoff, 47–69. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL, 2011.
- Leff, Enrique, ed. Ética, vida, sustentabilidad: Pensamiento ambiental latinoamericano. Mexico City: PNUMA, 2002.
- Lentz, David, ed. Imperfect Balances: Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
- Martí, José. "Artículos varios." In Obras completas. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975.
- Martí, José. "Guatemala." In Obras completas. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975.
- Martí, José. "Nuestra América." In Obras completas. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975.
- Martí, José. "Serie de artículos para La América." In Obras completas. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975.
- Martínez Alier, Joan Manuel. El ecologismo de los pobres: Conflictos ambientales y lenguajes de valoración. Barcelona: Icaria, 2010.
- Marx, Karl. Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política (Grundrisse), 1857–1858. Vol. 1. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1972.
- Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1973.
- McNeill, John R. Algo nuevo bajo el sol: Historia medioambiental del siglo XXI. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003.
- Melville, Elinor. Una plaga de ovejas: Consecuencias ambientales de la conquista de México. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999.
- Millenium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere. "Scientists Consensus on Maintaining Humanity's Life Support Systems in the 21st Century>." Accessed August, 2014.
- Morello, Jorge. "Grandes ecosistemas de Suramérica." In El futuro ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina. Edited by Gilberto C. Gallopín, 21–100. Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de las Naciones Unidas/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
- Pádua, José Augusto. Um sopro de destruição: Pensamento político e crítica ambiental no Brasil escravista, 1786–1888. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2002.
- Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos Walter. La globalización de la naturaleza y la naturaleza de la globalización. Havana, Cuba: Casa de Las Americas, 2008.
- Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente (PNUMA). GEO 5: Perspectivas del medio ambiente mundial. Panama City: PNUMA, 2012.
- Roberts, J. Timmons, and Nikki Demteria Thanos. Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2003.
- Sauer, Carl. The Early Spanish Main. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
- Solórzano, Juan Carlos. América Antigua: Los pueblos precolombinos desde el poblamiento original hasta los inicios de la conquista española. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial UCR, 2009.
- Sunkel, Osvaldo. "Introducción: La interacción entre los estilos de desarrollo y el medio ambiente en América Latina." In Estilos de desarrollo y medio ambiente en América Latina. Edited by Osvaldo Sunkel and Nicolo Gligo, 17–53. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980.
- Sunkel, Osvaldo, and Nicolo Gligo, eds. Estilos de desarrollo y medio ambiente en América Latina. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980.
- Toledo, Víctor. Modernidad y ecología. La nueva crisis planetaria. Barcelona: Icaria. 1992.
- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). GEO LAC 3: Latin America and the Caribbean: Environment Outlook. Panama City: UNEP, 2010.
- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): GEO LAC 3: Latin America and the Caribbean: Environment Outlook. Summary for Decision Makers. Panama City: UNEP, 2010.
- Worster, Donald. "Transformations of the Earth." In The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. By Donald Worster, 45–63. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Worster, Donald. "The Two Cultures Revisited." Environment and History 2.1 (1996): 3–14.
1. In this regard, for example, Chilean geographer Pedro Cunhill would state by mid-decade that "because of the spontaneity in establishing the forms of the sub-integrated habitat, due to the degrading intensity inherent in the various uses of agricultural land and the exploitation of forest, mining, and energy resources, where everything is dominated by the desire for immediate profit, a prospective crisis of the Latin American landscape is taking shape, irreversibly diminishing the options to mobilize landscapes and natural resources in the short term. Thus, the transformation of Latin American geo-historical space in the period between 1930 and 1990 apparently modernized cities, mines and fields, and industrialized a significant portion of its territories, but damaged, for the immediate future of the twenty-first century, much of the potential for sustained and sustainable development" (Cunill, Pedro. Las transformaciones del espacio geohistórico latinoamericano, 1930–1990. Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence).
2. Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth," in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 48–49.
3. In this regard, see, for example, R. Burkart, B. Marchetti, and J. Morello, "Grandes ecosistemas de México y Centroamérica," in El futuro ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina, ed. Gilberto C. Gallopín (Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de la Naciones Unidas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), pp. 101–163; and Jorge Morello, "Grandes ecosistemas de Suramérica," in El futuro ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospectiva de la América Latina, ed. Gilberto C. Gallopín (Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de la Naciones Unidas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), pp. 21–100.
4. In this regard, for example, GEO 5, 2012; GEO LAC 3, 2010; UNFPA on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean; CEPAL/UNASUR 2013.
6. Lithium, 65%; silver, 42%; copper, 38 %; tin, 33%, iron, 21%, bauxite, 18%, nickel, 14%, and oil, 20%. (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe and Unión de Naciones del Sur. Recursos naturales en UNASUR: Situación y tendencias para una agenda de desarrollo regional. Santiago de Chile: United Nations, 2013, pp. 7, 36.)
7. There are many descriptions and assessments of these environmental degradation processes, which usually tend to converge. In this regard, this article relies primarily on those from the GEO LAC 3 (2010) and GEO 5 (2012) reports, prepared by the United Nations Environment Programme, for their evident ecumenical character.
8. David de Ferranti, Guillermo E. Perry, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, and Michael Walton, Desigualdad en América Latina y el Caribe: ¿Ruptura con la historia? (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003).
9. This decomposition process coincides, on a global scale, with the deployment of the trend in the development of the world market that Karl Marx described in the Grundrisse of 1857–1858 in the following terms: "Just as capital has the tendency on one side to create ever more surplus labour, so it has the complimentary tendency to create more points of exchange, i.e., here, seen from the standpoint of absolute surplus value or surplus labour, to summon up more surplus labour as complement to itself; i.e., at bottom, to propagate production based on capital, or the mode of production corresponding to it. The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome … Commerce no longer appears here as a function taking place between independent productions for the exchange of their excess, but rather as an essentially all-embracing presupposition and moment of production itself." And adds: "On the other side, the production of relative surplus value, i.e., production of surplus value based on the increase and development of the productive forces, requires the production of new consumption; requires that the consuming circle within circulation expands as did the productive circle previously. Firstly quantitative expansion of existing consumption; secondly: creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly: production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values … Hence exploration of all of nature in order to discover new, useful qualities in things; universal exchange of the products of all alien climates and lands; new (artificial) preparation of natural objects" (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [London: Penguin, 1973], 408–409.
10. "And just as the Government provides as requested, and here it gives away lands, and there it takes away rights, and calls upon this one with flattery, and protects that one with subsidies, Salama and Coban are celebrating, and every day they see how their already considerable amount of guests grows … And it is all about soon owning more land than the house of Zichy owned in Hungary, or that of Osuna has in Spain, and Hernán Cortés in Mexico. Who would not buy the unexplored wilderness, lush and full of promises, if they were sold at fifty dollars a stable? And as in that province they hold the just belief that raising cattle will soon be at the top of the fortune, who does not pack their books and papers—although not them, but they are friends of the soul!—and goes, with their plows and wire fences, on the road towards Alta Verapaz?" (Martí, José. "Artículos varios" In Obras completas. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, VII, 133—translation by author).
11. Cunill, Pedro. Las transformaciones del espacio geohistórico latinoamericano, 1930–1990. Mexico City: El Colegio de México/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995, p. 9—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence.
12. Cunill, Las transformaciones del espacio geohistórico latinoamericano, p. 15—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence.
13. In this regard, for instance, Juan Carlos Solórzano reminds us that since "the end of the last ice age, more than ten thousand years ago, and up until the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century, the Americas was virtually isolated from the rest of the world. During these millennia of separation, the peoples of Latin America evolved independently from the civilizations that arose in Europe, Asia and Africa." And he adds: "Complex cultures in the Americas emerged late when compared to those in the Old World, largely a result of the relative scarcity of grains and how long it took for them to evolve into high-yielding crops. Cultures in the Americas, for much longer than those in the Old World, were faced with task of developing crops that are difficult to domesticate, so the economic support needed for the development of a complex agricultural civilization was not feasible until around 2000 B.C. in South America and 1500 B.C. in Mesoamerica, whereas in the Middle East, this process began towards 6500 B.C." (Solórzano, Juan Carlos. América Antigua: Los pueblos precolombinos desde el poblamiento original hasta los inicios de la conquista española. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial UCR, 2009, pp. 591, 592—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence).
14. Castro Herrera, Guillermo. Naturaleza y sociedad en la historia de América Latina. Panama City: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Justo Arosemena, 1995, p. 125—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence.
15. Solórzano, Juan Carlos. América Antigua: Los pueblos precolombinos desde el poblamiento original hasta los inicios de la conquista española. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial UCR, 2009, p. 593—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence.
16. Ibid, p. 595—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence.
17. Various sources estimate, in broad figures, that about 10 million African slaves were imported into the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. The largest contingent, around 2 million people, arrived between the late 18th century and the 1870s, coinciding with rise of the plantation economy in the Caribbean, along the coastlines, and in the southeastern United States. Hence, it can be said that the Caribbean constituted the central area where slavery and its accompanying manifestations occurred.
18. Gramsci, Antonio. "Apuntes de filosofía. Materialismo e idealismo." In Cuadernos de la Cárcel. Notebook 4: 1930–1932. Edición crítica del Instituto Gramsci. Mexico City: Ediciones ERA, 1999, p. 194—translation A. Tarté, personal correspondence.
19. For instance, the mid-1885 remark that, in the late 20th century, would serve as one of the starting points for the development of a Latin American environmental history: "When studying an historical event, or an individual act, … one sees that human intervention in Nature accelerates, change or stops the work of such [natural forces], and that all History is just a story of adjustment, and of fighting, between the extra-human Nature and human Nature, these pretentious generalizations seem childish, derived from absolute natural laws, whose application constantly supports the influence of unexpected and relative agents" (Martí, José. Obras completas. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, XXIII, p. 44; translation by author).
20. Two anthologies that are characteristic of this period are Osvaldo Sunkel and Nicolo Gligo, eds., Estilos de desarrollo y medio ambiente en América Latina (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980), which brings together forty-five authors and includes thirty-seven articles, in addition to the introduction by Sunkel himself; and Gilberto C. Gallopín, ed., El future ecológico de un continente: Una visión prospective de la América Latina (Mexico City: Editorial de la Universidad de las Naciones Unidas/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), which includes nineteen articles in addition to the introduction by Gallopín. Worth mentioning is the depth and intellectual richness of their contents as well as the commitment of the authors to the region's best interests, as they were perceived at the time of writing, and their perceptions of the growing concerns about environmental problems globally. Several of the authors in the volume edited by Sunkel and Gligo anticipated what would be stated in 1987 in Our Common Future—better known as the Brundtland Report—regarding the need for sustainable development. The volume edited by Gallopín provides a profuse source of information, assessing from the region's perspective the major agreements reached at the Earth Summit organized by the United Nations at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and known as Rio 92.
21. As noted by Juan Carlos Solórzano, "The affiliation between present-day Latin American societies and their pre-Columbian ancestors is, to a large extent, explained by their characteristics upon the arrival of the Europeans. For this reason, in the core areas of Mesoamerica and the Andes, the indigenous cultural heritage is remarkable, and today many of these countries claim the rich legacy of their ancestors" (Solórzano, Juan Carlos. América Antigua: Los pueblos precolombinos desde el poblamiento original hasta los inicios de la conquista española. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial UCR, 2009, p. 595—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondence). Such claim, used at the time by the dominant groups to justify their right to independence and self-government, is now exercised by the popular sectors to demand a participatory democracy and a much more inclusive economy, one that is linked to the welfare of the social majorities.
22. One of the most characteristic manifestations of the starting point for this new environmentalism can be found in the Manifiesto por la Vida: Por una ética de la sustentabilidad [Manifesto for life: In favour of an ethic for sustainability], published as part of the book Ética, vidad, sustentabilidad [Ethics, life, sustainability], edited by Enrique Leff (Mexico City: PNUMA, 2002), and signed by some twenty intellectuals from across the region. It concludes stating that ethics for sustainability "are ethics for the common good" (Leff, Enrique, ed. Ética, vida, sustentabilidad: Pensamiento ambiental latinoamericano. Mexico City: PNUMA, 2002, p. 331).
23. One of the most prominent spokesmen about this link between environmentalism and the new social movements, Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, expresses the basic nature of such a relationship in the following terms: "Until now, the dream of the western white man, made universal by globalization, was to dominate the Earth and subdue all other beings, in order to obtain unlimited benefits. Four centuries later, that dream has become a nightmare. More than ever before, the apocalypse may be caused by ourselves, this is what the great historian Arnold Toynbee wrote before his death. Hence, it is necessary to rebuild our humanity and our civilization through a different type of relationship with the Earth for it to be sustainable; in other words, in order to preserve the conditions of maintenance and reproduction that sustain life on the planet. This will only happen if we remake the natural covenant with the Earth, and if we consider that all living beings, carriers of the same basic genetic code, form the greater community of life. They all have intrinsic value and are therefore subject to rights." And adds: "The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, member of the Aymara indigenous group, continues to repeat that the twenty-first century will be the century of the rights of Mother Earth, of nature, and of all living beings. In his speech before the UN on April 22, 2009, he briefly listed some of rights of Mother Earth: the right of Mother Earth to the regeneration of its biocapacity; the right to life of all living beings, especially those threatened with extinction; the right to a pure life, because Mother Earth has the right to live free of contamination and pollution; the right to live well for all citizens; the right to harmony and equilibrium with and among all things; the right to connect with the Whole of which we are part" (Boff, Leonardo. Ecología: Grito de la tierra, grito de los pobres. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2011—translation: A. Tarté, personal correspondende).
24. In this sense, the Latin American cultural contribution to the development of global environmentalism affects particularly the role of the humanities in understanding our relationship with nature, as stated by Donald Worster in pointing out that "at the very center of environmental history must stand the study of evolving world views, a study at least as important as investigating the reorganization of the landscape that has occurred. For that study in the history of ideas we emphatically need the humanities and all their expertise, their methods, their traditions. So we are opening the door in the wall that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind. Where we are arriving is not at some point where all academic distinctions and boundaries disappear, where the categories of nature and culture have been completely abolished or subsumed, but one where those boundaries are more permeable than before. Nature has become less easy to isolate from culture than we once thought, and vice-versa. The two realms are linked together in an endless loop of exchanges, interactions, and meanings, so that they keep collapsing into one another. We try to make them distinct, and sometimes for good reason: we need to try to step outside of culture regularly and acknowledge, as Henry Thoreau once put it, 'our own limits transgressed.' On the other hand, we have to realize that what we mean by nature is inescapably a mirror held up by culture to its environment, a mirror reflecting itself. This is a paradox we humans cannot get out of. The door we open between the two cultures is finally a passage to that unresolvable paradox" (Daniel Worster, "The Two Cultures Revisited," Environment and History 2, no.1 [1996], 13).


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Humble Beginnings
With a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State and a $12,000 investment ($4,000 of it borrowed), Ben and Jerry open their first ice cream scoop shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont.
Next Step…
Ben and Jerry celebrate the shop's one-year anniversary – and the customers who made it possible – by holding the first-ever Free Cone Day: free scoops for all, all day long. The annual ice cream give-away continues today in scoop shops around the world.


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OTTAWA, March 11 (UPI) -- David Krejci scored in the fourth round of a shootout Monday and the Boston Bruins won their 10th straight in Ottawa with a 2-1 defeat of the Senators.
After each team scored twice during the first three rounds of the tiebreaker, Tuukka Rask made a toe save on a spin-around attempt by the Senators' Kaspars Daugavins to open the fourth round.
Krejci then followed with a high forehand shot over the glove of Robin Lehner, enabling the Bruins to continue their road dominance of Ottawa and notch their third straight win overall.
Shawn Thornton and Daniel Paille scored in regulation and Rask finished with 30 saves in Boston's victory.
Guillaume Latendresse and Kyle Turris each scored for struggling Ottawa, which fell for the fifth time in six games.
Lehner turned aside 33 shots.


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Today in Black History Month, the talented and happy Pharrell continues to make history with his music, acting, clothing design, label exec and more! Definitely someone to look up to!
via The Urban Daily
While you were busy living your life, Pharrell Williams was out here having the best year ever. After collecting a few Grammys and being nominated for an Oscar, Pharrell revealed he would be releasing an a;bum titled "GIRL" very soon. Now, the "Happy" singer is dropping the tracklist to continue to build anticipation for the album.
As you would expect, Pharrell calls in some favors from some of his famous friends. constant collaboratorJustin Timberlake lends his vocals to a song called "Brand New" and Daft Punk shows Pharrell Williams some love on the track "Dust of the Wind." Miley Cyrus and Alicia Keys also make guest appearances on Pharrell's second solo project.
heck the full tracklist below.
1 "Marilyn Monroe"
2 "Brand New" (Feat. Justin Timberlake)
3 "Hunter"
4 "Gush"
5 "Happy"
6 "Come Get It" (feat. Miley Cyrus)
7 "Dust Of The Wind" (Feat. Daft Punk)
8 "Lost Queen"
9 "Freq"
10 "I Know Who You Are" (Feat. Alicia Keys)
11 "It Girl"
-DJ Dimepiece "The Mixin' Vixen"


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Year-End Tax Planning
Keeping your business up and running is hard enough as it is. Throw in the holiday rush and 2020's unexpected financial ups and downs, and it's easy to see why your books might be out of order as the year winds down.
But if you want to start 2021 off on the right foot—not to mention keep the IRS happy—it's crucial to organize your books before the tax year ends. If that sounds like a tall order, don't worry; no matter what state your books are in now, it's entirely possible to get them in ship-shape before the end of the year. These three bookkeeping tips can help get you started.
1. Create an End-Of-Year Bookkeeping Checklist
Unfortunately, end-of-year bookkeeping isn't usually a one-and-done task. Instead, it's a multi-step process with a lot of moving parts. Creating a step-by-step checklist (personalized to your business and the state of your accounts) can help you track each task. Depending on how organized your books are, your year-end checklist could look something like this:
- Organize receipts, bills, and invoices, and enter all financial transactions for the year you haven't yet logged.
- Follow up on accounts receivable and accounts aging by following up on unpaid customer invoices or tackling your own unpaid bills before the end of the year.
- Verify that your inventory stock is up to date, especially once the holiday rush dies down.
- Familiarize yourself with this year's tax codes so you're prepared to file taxes in April.
- Calculate depreciation on your fixed assets for tax write-offs.
- Reconcile each of your financial accounts, including bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and any other sources of funding.
- Create end-of-year financial documents, especially cash flow statements, profit and loss statements, and balance sheets to review your business's annual performance and start planning for the new financial year.
Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tasks organizing your books requires? Realistic, actionable goal setting can help, especially deciding on a date and time to finalize each task.
2. Verify Payroll Taxes and Calculate Employee Bonuses
Payroll taxes are a big deal, and paying the wrong amount will come back to haunt you come April. As you wrap up your books, double-check your payroll tax payments to ensure you've paid the right amount this year.
If you used a PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loan to cover employee paychecks this year, read through the Small Business Association's list of FAQs to see how PPP loans impact payroll taxes.
And, if you offer employee bonuses based on your business's end-of-year profits, don't forget to calculate the right amount of bonus tax withholdings before sending out employee paychecks.
3. Schedule Bookkeeping Time
Bookkeeping isn't something you can just squeeze in at the start or end of the day—especially not end-of-year bookkeeping. Decide now on a date and time to wrap up your business's books before December 31st. If possible, try to avoid bookkeeping during business hours. You need an uninterrupted, distraction-free period of time (or several periods of time, depending) to focus on your business's financials.
Of course, uninterrupted and distraction-free might feel like terms from another era, especially if you're a sole proprietor working from home or juggling caretaking responsibilities with full-time work. Do whatever you need to focus on bookkeeping for a few hours, from finding a day you can work without distractions to breaking up your distraction-free time into a few 20-minute chunks.
Finally, celebrate!
Finalizing your books is hard—especially after a year as trying as 2020. Once you've gotten your books in order, reward yourself in whatever way you can, whether that's bingeing a TV show, baking yourself a cupcake, or simply enjoying a long, hot shower. Seriously: you earned it.
Copyright © 2023 SCORE Association, SCORE.org
Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.